Item 101
Glass paperweight with LED underneath
NFS
Talisman ("Objects that have magical power, are lucky, or are alive")
We are Nomai. We watch over your world from the vastening deep between dimensions. And, while we have no circulatory systems to pump liquids through our crystalline matrices, we do have metaphors... and our hearts break to watch your strife.
We are Nomai, and we think as one. Our assessment is that you cannot go on as you have done. And so we devise a plan, and construct a device deep within ourselves—a device that will transform you profoundly, that will create within you the unity that we ourselves enjoy. The device is called Panhedron.
Our unity is threatened, albeit only briefly, when we observe that many—perhaps even most—of you would not consent to our gift, if you were to be made aware of it now, as fragmented as you are. But we reason among ourselves, and realize that you as you shall become will thank us for remaking you in... no, not in our image, but as a more perfect version of yourselves. We will recreate you in more subtle bodies, like unto crystals.
Once completed, our Panhedron travels through the vastening deep to penetrate your heavy atmosphere, settles in a body of liquid near one of your larger population centers, and begins its working. You could think of the device as conducting a global search and replace. It takes away the fierce liquids that cause such storms within you, and replaces them with new ones, fluids that might be called ouestrogen and eastrogen. The transformation happens quickly, over the course of a single night and day: your bodies become more uniform, all shining a deep golden brown, all taking on the same shape and size. You will never achieve our crystalline perfection, but your new flesh is as close as flesh can come.
We realize that this change will take time to work its effects on your societies, and so we... turn our attention to other things, resolutely ignoring your world for a span that seems interminable even to us, although it is no more than a hundred or so of your years. And then we return, eager to see the success of our project.
Only to find... strife. Conflict. Murders and slavery and war—all the same evils to which you were prey before. You, who have become perfection, have taken advantage of our absence to seize upon every slightest difference between your new selves. A subtle excess of radiance in the infrablue or ultra-red becomes an excuse for exaltation, or for discrimination. Your golden blood is spilled in the streets, as often as the redder stuff was spilled before.
We were wrong. We were wrong, and we admit it to ourselves, and we are humbled by our lack of understanding.
So we undo. It is easy enough to trigger Panhedron to reverse the changes it made, to leach the eastrogen and ouestrogen from your bodies and replace it with the old fluids. It is somewhat harder to drain the memories of this experiment from your minds, but our device is capable of that as well. And when it is done, our underwater crystal dissolves itself, as if it had never been.
By the time you read this, you will think it no more than fiction.
* * * *
—10/6/2022
©2022 Alan P. Scott. All rights reserved.
Last updated October 16, 2022
Contact me:
ascott@pacifier.com